The Symphony Interactive project has been a huge learning experience for me. Developing in the iOS environment is very interesting and the results are always cool because you get to see your work running on an iPad.

The project had a rocky start for several reasons. I had no experience developing for Apple iOS devices, which left me a bit ignorant when the time came to design the application early on. After creating an early version of the program using low level APIs, I was finally able to start grasping some of the platform specifics and quirks. This led me to re-implement the project using more powerful libraries and high level APIs. Thanks to a lot of hard work by many people we were able to pull everything together and create the application that we aimed to.

Currently I’m working on developing remaining functionality, project documentation, and minor adjustments.

- Wallace Brown, Undergraduate Computer Graphics Programmer/Intern

Here is a screenshot of the opening screen for the current Symphony Interactive iPad app prototype

Here is a screenshot of the inner workings for the prototype. The functionality and animation will be placed in order to interact with the elements here

This is a 3D model of the instrument titled MIRI

This is a 3D model of the instrument titled NIR

In order to explain their function, I’ve been building some models (above) to use in an animation explaining both their placement inside the telescope and the kind of data they’re able to process. It should be finished soon, so check back for updates!

The IRC’s very own Rachel Kreutzinger and Ryan Zuber recently completed an animation showing these effects.

Purple Arrows => The Transpolar Drift: A dominant circulation feature in the Arctic Ocean that carries freshwater runoff from rivers in Russia across the North Pole and south towards Greenland.
Red Arrows => Freshwater Runoff: Carried by the transpolar drift.
Blue Arrows => Emergent Circulation Patterns: Drive freshwater runoff east towards Canada, resulting in freshening of Arctic water in the Canada Basin under changing atmospheric conditions.

While the IRC is in no way interested in profit as a motivation, we are increasingly looking to see what if any real effects our visual/media research has upon the project on which we work. For the Symphony Interactive, we are utilizing a metric developed at Microsoft called the Desirability Toolkit. This set of metrics is designed to help elicit custom user reactions. Instead of a asking a list of questions that may lead the viewer to an answer, users pull words from a word cloud that best reflect their experience. The results are qualitative, but give quick and easy impressions of user experience. Being that many of us here at the IRC are artists, who traditionally make things for people to see and react to, finding ways to measure success is pretty important to us.

The input page for a person (John Widgeon) will look similar to this.

And this is how that information, at this time, translates into the site’s design:

That same person (right) on the main page of the Mapping Baybrook website

Some Background Information

The bills abbreviated as SOPA and PIPA aim at preventing the infringement of copyright works, but those with expertise in, and enterprises built upon the Internet warn that the bills will do more harm than good. Here’s why:

SOPA and PIPA aim at blocking foreign websites that are “dedicated” to copyright infringement. Section 103 in SOPA reads:

SEC. 103. MARKET-BASED SYSTEM TO PROTECT U.S. CUSTOMERS AND PREVENT U.S. FUNDING OF SITES DEDICATED TO THEFT OF U.S. PROPERTY.

(a) DEFINITIONS.—In this section:

(1) DEDICATED TO THEFT OF U.S. PROPERTY.—An ‘‘Internet site is dedicated to theft of U.S. property’’ if—

(A) it is an Internet site, or a portion thereof, that is a U.S.-directed site and is used by users within the United States; and

(B) either—

(i) the U.S.-directed site is primarily designed or operated for the purpose of, has only limited purpose or use other than, or is marketed by its operator or another acting in concert with that operator for use in, offering goods or services in a manner that engages in, enables, or facilitates—

(I) a violation of section 501 of title 17, United States Code;

(II) a violation of section 1201 of title 17, United States Code; or

(III) the sale, distribution, or promotion of goods, services, or materials bearing a counterfeit mark, as that term is defined in section 34(d) of the Lanham Act or section 2320 of title 18, United States Code; or…

SOPA defines an Internet site as one dedicated to theft of U.S. property if it “engages in, enables, or facilitates” copyright infringement. “Enabling” can be most directly interpreted as allowing users to share files that might be text, video, audio, photos or software applications, but can also be interpreted to include allowing users to comment or communicate with each other because when people craft their own writing, they are authoring original content and have rights to that intellectual property. The word, “facilitating” refers to features of a site that make it easier to do such things. Sites that offer either or both of these abilities to users, or in any way allow users to share content that has active copyright protection are sites that “engage” in copyright infringement as the law is currently written.

The problem many see in the bill is that this could mean that any website that allows users to share files, post videos, post comments, or possibly even communicate in any way could be identified as being dedicated to copyright infringement unless some kind of license to use the material is explicitly given to the site and other users by those who create any kind of original content. Section 2 of PIPA uses this same language “…engaging in, enabling, or facilitating…” in it’s definition of an Internet site dedicated to infringing activities.

Of great concern to the IRC and all of those working to realize the potential of the Internet is that all websites that meet these definitions could be determined to be dedicated to theft of U.S. property, and consequently be blocked from access within the U.S. They also, under the law, be removed from search engine results, denied payment from payment processors, and removed from advertisement networks.

How might a site avoid such a scenario? According to PIPA section 5 and SOPA section 104, a website may become immune to being blocked if it voluntarily takes action against copyright infringement. It would have to ensure that it does not engage, enable, or facilitate copyright infringement by monitoring and approving everything that any users shares on it’s site.

Is that something that can be done?

In the United States, copyrights last 70 years after the author’s death, meaning that all works where the author is still alive today or if the author has died after 1941 would have to be compared to everything that all users share. All text, videos, audio, images, etc., would all have to be compared with all copyrighted works since 1941. New content created at the site would have to be licensed. Any links to other sites that could be determined to be dedicated to theft of U.S. property would also be considered copyright infringement. To share an external link, the entire website would need to be scanned and analyzed for copyrighted materials. Critics of the bill, which include those most aware of the capabilities software and manpower can provide in this arena (Google and Wikipedia are both strong critics of the bill) do not believe that this level of diligence is even possible, let alone reasonable. It is possible that without being able to implement a way to analyze and remove copyright works the only way to prevent a site from being blocked is to completely deny users from sharing anything at all.

So given the problems that would be involved in implementing the bills, why are some organizations lobbying so hard to do it? They believe the cost of Internet piracy is sufficiently high to justify what they want to see done. While the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and other groups have provided numbers regarding the matter, the U.S. Government Accountability Office released a 32 page document in April 2010 that argues “…it is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the economy-wide impacts.” [1] It details that for such numbers to be generated, too many questionable assumptions need to be made about the rate at which consumers would purchase legitimate products over those that are counterfeit.

A Way Forward?

Intellectual property is an important component of the U.S. economy. However, bills such as SOPA and PIPA could impinge catastrophically on the freedoms of legitimate websites and users, and damage the economy and other dimensions of our social welfare in both predictable and unforeseen ways.

The IRC, consequently, joins others in believing that the best way to effectively diminish copyright infringement is to provide a service superior to pirating. Content creators need to be able to adopt new business models that will provide content to consumers on demand without restriction. This is already being done in services such as Netflix, Hulu, Steam, iTunes, etc. They provide convenient, legal access to content on demand at costs users are willing to pay.

As the issues of copyright protection and infringement on the Internet rise higher in the public consciousness, we believe that consumers, more and more, will want to be able to reward those who produce original content. Many consumers will, as the success of iTunes alone makes clear, be willing to pay reasonable prices using a convenient service which supports the creators of the content they enjoy.

Educate Yourself

Links for Further Information

References

The time signatures used to denote the exact number of beats per measure ensure that all of the musicians remain in sync with one another. However, the visual shorthand used for notation discussed earlier distorts the written score so that some measures are compressed VISUALLY on the page. This means that despite the time signature, which keeps the pace regulated, any graphical element attempting to trace the path of a visual score representation through time would have to change speeds to accommodate the visual distortion. As an analogy, imagine having to run two different distances in the same amount of time. You would have to walk slower to cover a shorter distance and faster for a longer distances. We thought this could pose some potentially disruptive visual problems because the visual pace of motion would change independently of the tempo changes in the music being heard. The following render is test of that theory.

When producing musical scores utilizing MIDI, or Musical Instrument Digital Interface, there is an idea known as “quantizing”. Quantizing is a way to easily translate the captured imperfections of a human performance into the exact timing needed. While this is used for musical performances and we are not utilizing MIDI for this project, the IRC is currently researching how to VISUALLY quantize a traditional musical score so as to remove the tempo distortions seen in the test render. Get it….quantize…….quant-eyes….visual…the capital letters….get it!? EYES!?!?!?

The goal of the project was to illustrate the “Daisyworld” thought experiment, originally conceived by James Lovelock and Andrew Watson as a way to demonstrate environmental feedback. If a planet were completely covered in black daisies, the temperature would gradually rise, as black colored objects absorb lots of energy. Eventually, this hypothetical planet gets warm enough for white flowers to start growing, which begin reflecting energy. Think of white and black cars on a sunny day, and you get the idea. As the planet cools down again, more black daisies grow, which starts the cycle over again. Eventually the temperature stabilizes and the populations are equal.

My animation is part of a longer film produced at Goddard Space Flight Center, which will be shown all around the country in a few months.

Congrats and Thanks to Phil and Lindsay who did the bulk of this work.

- Dan Bailey, Director